Age verification - am I missing something?

I've seen so many angles and opinions being displayed over the age verification issue, but there is one thing I really can't get my head around. Am I being really simple, or is the age verification that's being offered predicated on only one thing.......

the presentation of *a* valid set of credentials

Any set of valid credentials. How are they validated against the person offering them? Little Johnny gets his dad's passport and uses the details.... and bingo, that 14 year old is verfied to be 40.

Seems to me that this actually *reduces* the integrity of accounts, as it adds a false sense of security.

Or do I have it wrong?

And if that happened, who would be legally responsible for any bad things Little Johnny did while he was in SL?

It's rather pointless actually. It just makes money for the company with the data base. Second Life is for adults only, says so in the TOS. Marking a plot "mature" actually accomplishes nothing because you can move your camera from a PG plot to a mature plot pretty easy. Then again, if my plot is in a mature sim, why would I need to bother? What is the point? I can't make a PG plot in the middle of a mature sim. I can't make a mature plot in a PG sim either. Since it is in SL's TOS, it is LL burden to verify every person who logs on is over 18, it is not the resident's. If any of this ends up in a court room, the judge is going to ask if Phillip is nucking futs.

Tried it last night and wasn't successful until I tried old, old, *old* information and then got verified. The company they're contracting with is apparently using sources that are (in at least one case), unbelievably old and out of date, which is to say in my case, definitively inaccurate.

Makes me nervous.

The databasing company is a political deployment group that focuses on large campaigns world wide,
their own website lists several country's in which they've run successful campaigns,
you are giving them enough information to access your entire history,
but of course it has nothing to do with that right?
LL says *they* will never sell your information to third partys,
but this political deployment group, which is KNOWN to use information received from a certain beer website they verify for, makes NO such promise,
so really, whom is paying whom here?
It seems advantageous for this company to collect our information, it isn't for LL...
so...you know.

For age verification alone, it probably doesn't matter a whole lot whether it actually works or doesn't: LL can most likely hide behind the fact that if someone submits false information they can't be held responsible, or they could hide behind Aristotle's marketing message of accurate verification.

It seems like LL wants verification to also be the basis of trust, which is where things get more worrying. If people really do end up implicitly trusting IDV then there's a good chance scammers will try to impersonate someone's identity.

There's quite a few people whose RL name is quite public (including Lindens) so anyone could just make an identity verified alt ("yes, I'm really Philip's alt, here, just look at the Philip Rosedale verified RL name on my account" to cause misschief if they don't address that problem.

If an underage user gets in using their parent's info, the parent is responsible for letting their child have access to that info. I can't imagine a court putting the responsibility on any website for that.

IMO, that's where the responsibiiity for minors should be anyway.